Charlemagne

Europe's horse whisperers

How politicians conjure up their own demons before summits

IN THE scientific annals there is a cautionary tale of Clever Hans, a horse who baffled Germans 100 years ago by counting and telling the time. Only patient observation by a psychologist found that Hans was no mathematician. His trainer was unconsciously signalling answers to the horse with involuntary cues. The lesson is that it can take study to see who is leading whom.

Unexpectedly, Charlemagne found himself reminded of Clever Hans this week, when watching the defensive positions staked out by European Union leaders—notably in such places as Britain and Poland—in the run-up to their summit in Lisbon. The summit is due to thrash out final demands for changes to a new “reform treaty”, a thinly disguised reworking of the draft constitution rejected by Dutch and French voters in 2005.

Eurocrats usually blame their troubles on cynical Brussels-bashing by national politicians. The politicians, in turn, blame their sceptical voters, or their irresponsible press. But—recall Hans the horse—it is instructive to look carefully at just who, over the years, has been signalling to whom that they should be so wary of Europe. It is a more muddled picture than the Brussels consensus might suggest.

Start with the national politicians. The maddest pre-Lisbon demand came from Britain, where members of Parliament sounded the alarm over a provision that “national parliaments shall contribute actively to the good functioning of the union.” The word “shall”, they fretted, could lead European judges to require them to put the EU's interests above Britain's. In vain, officials insisted that the article was an anti-federalist device added to meet Dutch demands that national parliaments should have more say in Brussels. Desperate to exorcise the spectre of jackbooted gendarmes hauling parliamentarians off their green leather benches to a Luxembourg courtroom, David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, found himself at a pre-summit meeting pleading (successfully) for the word “shall” to be cut.

At the same meeting the Poles displayed a touch of the vapours too. Asked why Poland had followed Britain in seeking a semi-exemption from the Charter of Fundamental Rights (a sweeping list of social and political rights), officials said their government was worried that the charter could force Poland to legalise gay marriage and accept unlimited abortion. The British government wants to minimise the risk that the charter, which enshrines such things as a right to strike, could threaten their liberalising, Thatcher-era labour-law reforms.

Such British and Polish worries provoke much head-shaking in EU circles. The right to strike may be mentioned in the charter, it is said, but the words have no real force: the right to down tools is not in the EU's gift, as other clauses in other treaties make clear. The charter should be seen more as a cheering “snapshot” of modern European values. It is seen as weird and paranoid to imagine that it could impose something as sensitive as gay marriage on a country—or that Europe would ever try.

So are national politicians silly to worry about being obliged to toe an imaginary EU line? Sometimes, yes. One diplomat this week marvelled that anybody could see a treaty article inviting people to support the “good functioning” of the EU as a legal instruction. It is, he said, a statement of political opinion—it means as much as European politicians agree it means.

But this is an unsatisfying answer to politicians in a place like Britain, where laws mean what they say, and are not deployed as mere slogans. If sweeping declarations in the charter about outlawing discrimination are not meant to overturn national policies, a Pole asks, why are they there? “When we ask what all these big words mean, everybody tells us: nothing special, don't worry. But we should avoid this kind of rhetoric.”

If national governments are paranoid, moreover, they may have good cause. The ever-deeper-union camp has a record of inserting coded language into treaties, so that projects such as monetary union can be revisited later. British officials also have memories of being tricked over opt-outs: in the mid-1990s they secured an exemption from the social chapter, a shopping list of labour and social-policy measures. They have not forgotten that, a few years later, the European Commission circumvented their opt-out by calling a directive to limit the hours employees may work a health-and-safety measure, not a social one.

Paranoid leaders, befuddled voters

And what of voters? The politicians like to blame them and the press for insisting on a defence of red lines at summits. But leaders send their own cues to the voters. Take Britain's Gordon Brown. Challenged in the House of Commons to defend the new treaty, and to explain his refusal to grant a referendum on it (even though one was promised for the constitution), Mr Brown recited the exemptions his government had won: “the opt-out, the protocol, the opt-in and the emergency brake.” He boasted that “we have stood up for the British national interest. That is more than the Conservative Party ever did over Maastricht.”

Yet British voters need not be rabid Europhobes to conclude from this that the new treaty must, in its original, non-red-lined form, have been dangerous. If the British national interest were not under attack, why is it so necessary to stand up for it? Just what terrors does Mr Brown think the Conservatives unleashed by signing the 1992 Maastricht treaty?

It is a muddle, then. This matters because those who are heading to Lisbon this week, from both Brussels and national capitals, believe themselves to be crafting a treaty that will answer the real hopes and fears of European voters. But given the subliminal cues and mixed messages that they are sending out, politicians and Eurocrats can have little confidence that they have any idea what their citizens want. As any behavioural scientist can tell you, if you cannot exclude Clever Hans effects from an experiment, you might as well throw the data away.